At the beginning of this chapter, you read about Wegmans and its approach to human resource management. Using the information presented in this chapter, you should now be able to respond to these questions.

SAS Institute is a private tech company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, that has more than 6,000 employees in the United States and twice that many worldwide. Like most great companies, SAS pays its employees well. This is important—as a company that helps businesses turn raw data into useful information, their employees are at the core of their success. However, SAS also places a very high value on work/life balance. SAS has a companywide standard that employees don’t work more than 37.5 hours per week. Of course, there are times when employees need to put in extra hours, but they are encouraged to take time off soon afterward to recharge. Each employee has a private office (no cubicles or shared work spaces) and is able to take advantage of the on-site hair and nail salons, shoe and jewelry repair shops, and dry-cleaning and tailoring services. Many services are provided for free on-site, such as tax preparation and a health clinic and pharmacy. They even offer a seasonal farmers market, right at Cary headquarters.

SAS Institute is an ideal employer for those with families. Employees’ children are welcomed at work, both at the subsidized on-site daycare center and in the cafeteria, which includes kid-friendly items such as octopus-shaped hot dogs on the menu. Employees with school-aged children are encouraged to bring their kids to work with them on the occasional teacher workdays, making the balancing act of parenting and working a little easier. In a recent survey, one employee put it this way: “SAS has provisions to support you at whatever stage of life you are in—child care for your newborn to preschooler, resources for dealing with your teenager and college planning, help with your elderly parent. More importantly, a real sense of community is built when people work together for so long.”

Founder and CEO Jim Goodnight believes that it’s essential that employees feel trusted and valued. By almost every metric, this has paid off. In the software industry, turnover tends to be about 20 percent per year, as employees hop from one job to the next in hopes of higher pay or better working conditions. This is not the case at SAS, where turnover is just about 4 percent. In a recent survey, more than 95 percent of employees rated SAS as an employer with great challenges, great atmosphere, great rewards, and even great bosses.